The Simulacrum - Chapter 74~ Part 1

“Leo! I think they’re done!” my sister announced without looking away from the front window.

She, along with the tiny miko, was glued to it since the early morning, when the repair crew arrived to fix the damage done to the utility pole in front of our house. The experience was apparently really novel for both of them, as they watched them do their job like it was magic. Though again, maybe from the point of view of a person of magical persuasion, comparatively more mundane things like this were really intriguing.

Speaking of the repairmen, they were surprisingly efficient, and even though it was still barely past nine in the morning, they already replaced the whole pole and reattached all the cables. We still didn’t have electricity yet, though I figured that was probably because they turned off the power in the whole neighborhood before they started working. Or at least I hoped so, because as silly as this world could occasionally make placeholders behave, I sincerely doubted they’d work with live wires.

That said, the pole and the wires were the only two things they had to deal with, as the ninja maids apparently moonlighted as a road repair crew as well, and by the time we got up in the morning, they erased all the other collateral damage that my over-eager self-appointed retainer did to the street. This, of course, raised a single question (well, okay, it technically raised a lot of them, but we kind of already got used to weird stuff like this just happening overnight), namely why the Simulacrum didn’t take care of the pole the same way? Was it because it was a more complex task? Or maybe because Snowy called the utility company last evening, and so the world already poofed the repairmen into existence in response? And if so, what are these highly trained professionals going to do with the rest of their lives in this impeccably new and immaculate world, without anything else to fix?

I’m not going to lie, I was half-tempted to go outside and tag them for Far Sight just out of curiosity, but I was already more than a little overwhelmed by the number of people I had to keep track of on a daily basis, so I quickly exiled all such capricious ideas from my mind and focused on the inside of my house instead.

“Are we ready to go yet?”

Elly’s statement wasn’t aimed at anyone in particular, yet it immediately triggered a small frenzy in the other three girls in the room.

“Just a moment, I still need to fix my hair,” Judy noted while using a hand-held mirror to take multiple looks at her new hair accessory.

“I’ll get my purse,” Snowy said next, and a moment later she was already rushing up the stairs.

“I’m ready to go, Elly-ue!” Ichiko declared in turn, earning her a frown from me.

“No, you’re not. Even if you don’t have a winter coat, at least put on an extra hoodie or something,” I told her, prompting the little miko to glance down at her not-at-all winter-ready apparel.

“Should I ask Snowy-ue for a spare?” she inquired, and I gave her a nod in response, at which point she skipped up the stairs as well.

I let out a long breath and took a sip from my trusty mug. Judy was in a good mood this morning, so she prepared one of her Annoying Butler™ brand teas for me, and I was still in the middle of savoring it when the two younger girls returned to the living room. Before they could go any further though, I gestured for them to come over to my side first, much to my already fully dressed draconic girlfriend’s thinly veiled chagrin.

I pretended I didn’t see it, and instead I put my mug down and took out my wallet. Long story short, after receiving their anniversary gifts yesterday, the girls insisted that they’d get me something in return as well. I wasn’t really in the mood to argue, so I left it up to them, but then Snowy reminded us that if we went shopping, we should buy some winter clothes for Ichiko while we’re at it, so before I knew it, things slowly escalated into a full shopping trip. One where I couldn’t participate because it would’ve ruined the surprise.

Anyhow, since Snowy was also going along, I figured it was my brotherly duty to take care of her expenses, so after some consideration, I handed her a couple of Jen bills in the company of the words, “Here’s your allowance for this month, these are the funds for Ichiko’s new clothes, and finally, this is just a bit of extra you can use to buy whatever you want.”

“That’s a lot of money!” the foxy miko exclaimed while peeking at the notes in Snowy’s hand. My little sister, on the other hand, was slightly less enthusiastic.

“What should I do with the change?”

“You keep it, obviously,” I told her with my patently Big Brotherly Smile 1.2. “Just make sure you spend it responsibly.”

Snowy remained still for a beat, but then she suddenly opened her arms wide and gave me a big, if somewhat awkward, bear hug.

“Thanks, Leo! You’re the best!”

“You’re welcome.”

Following our exchange, Elly pointedly cleared her throat and pointed at the clock on the wall. I didn’t know why; I couldn’t remember them even agreeing on a time to leave, nor would the shops close down any time soon. Maybe she just really wanted to go shopping? Either way, before Snowy left for the entryway, I stopped her again and firmly requested, “Please repeat the protocol in case the Knight girl shows up while you’re out in the city.”

She froze in her tracks for a second, but then she quickly collected her thoughts and told me, “Don’t engage in combat, try to stay in populated areas where she can’t start a fight, use the emergency app and wait for you to come over, and in the meantime annoy her with Monty Python references.”

Her voice was a little mechanical, but it was only to be expected considering I made her memorize that sentence word for word. I rewarded her by lightly tousling the top of her head, and telling her, “Good. Don’t stress too much about her though, and try to have fun.”

“We’ll do!” Ichiko replied in her stead, but then Snowy also agreed with a nod.

By this point even Judy looked a little impatient, so I let them go… and then it turned out that the reason why Judy was tapping her foot against the floor wasn’t because she wanted to get going, but because she wanted to take their place in front of me.

“Chief, how do I look?”

It was obvious that she was asking about her bow, so this time I dusted out my Caring Boyfriendly Smile 2.1 instead and told her, “Pretty cute, I’d say.”

My dear assistant let out a satisfied noise, followed by the declaration, “I’ll use this opportunity to buy some more accessories. I’m going to reinvent myself as a main character.”

“You really don’t have to though,” I responded with my mouth widening even further. “You’re already a main character in my life, and the protagonist of your own.”

“It can’t hurt to try. In fact, I should’ve done this a long time ago. Imagine how much character development I could’ve experienced if I got a hairclip before our first date.”

“I don’t think you need it though; I already love you the way you are.”

Judy remained quiet for a moment, but then she cocked her head to the side a little and muttered something along the lines of, “This is more effective than I thought it would be.”

“… What are you talking about?”

“The bow,” she responded, and she even pointed at the back of her head for further emphasis. “You never said sappy, romantic things like that until I wore it. It’s unexpectedly powerful.”

I could barely stop my eyes from rolling, but before I could say anything in response, Elly came over and interrupted our talk by asking, “I thought Leo was already quite romantic lately, wasn’t he?”

Huh. I expected that she’d complain about us holding everyone up, but apparently the opportunity to talk about romance overwrote such concerns.

“Of course he was romantic with you. You already had a unique hairstyle,” Judy declared with a confident huff. “For me, this is all new.”

“No, it’s not, and please stop being meta for five seconds,” I chided my girlfriend, following which I took out a 50 Jen bill and handed it to her. She looked a little baffled for the moment, so I leaned closer and whispered directly into her ear. “In case you really find a cute accessory and you want to buy it. I don’t want anyone to think I’m standing in the way of your character development.”

After saying so, I gave her a playful wink, and then followed it up by planting a kiss on her forehead. She remained silent for a while once again, after which she turned to Elly.

“You see? I’m still not used to him acting like this. It’s the power of the hair accessories.”

“I’m fairly sure Leo’s been acting romantic like that ever since we started going out,” Elly whispered in response, yet somehow even she sounded unsure of her words. More importantly though, I felt that this conversation was going in circles, so I got her attention by grabbing hold of her hand.

“I’m not going to give you an allowance, because you probably have more money on you than I do, so you have to do with this,” I told my currently somewhat dazed, girlfriend and punctuated my words with another kiss, this time on the lips. After the first surprise, Elly reflexively wanted to move on to the tongue-stuff (we’ve been practicing last night), but I retreated before we would make Snowy and Ichiko uncomfortable… But then again, the little miko was still in the process of putting on her borrowed coat and was paying little attention to us, while my sister was probably more knowledgeable about these things than the three of us combined, so maybe it was a moot point to begin with.

Anyhow, once everyone got ready, I bid them farewell at the main entrance (which included handing out two more goodbye-kisses), and the four of them left in high spirits. Once they were out of sight, I returned to the living room and picked up my mug. It cooled off a bit already, and to be honest, I was starting to miss the central heating. My home was well-insulated, but it was mid-November already, the weather outside was pretty chilly, and we had no heating since last afternoon, so the room temperature was getting a little low for my liking.

I was just about to head upstairs to put on another sweater when I was startled by the familiar sound of the furnace kicking in downstairs, and a quick glance at the thermostat told me the power was already back. I had to admit, that was pretty quick, but I definitely wasn’t complaining. After turning up the heating, I walked upstairs anyway and stopped in front of my PC. After it booted up, I met another pleasant surprise: the internet was also working. Since it was relying on the same pole, I expected that after the utility company fixed the electricity, I’d have to wait for a while for the internet provider to fix their part, but things were already working fine. Neat.

Well, there went my plan to spend the day Far Sight spying on people; since I had internet, now I had more important things to take care of first. As such, I took a seat in front of the PC, opened my browser with the built-in VPN, and immediately checked the Celestial Hub. I went through the usual steps: first I checked if I had any PMs, then I quickly skimmed the new reports related to the island, then the forums for any new and/or interesting topics, and once I was done with that, I opened my own super-secret file and checked for any development.

According to the latest changes, the Celestial healer was already on Critias, but they were laying low because of the lockdown. It appears that they smuggled themselves onto the island by getting air-dropped from a commercial flight and using a parachute to land before they ‘donned a disguise to mingle with the natives’. I had to give it to them; so far this was the closest thing to an actual spy movie development the Celestial Intelligence Network produced since I first started perusing the Hub. Anyhow, I made a mental note about the healer and that I should expect a visit one of these days, and then finally moved on to the main topic I had in mind.

Following last night’s revelation, I realized that pulling the talking sword, while narratively incongruous and more than a little baffling, might not have been such a terrible development after all. I focused so much on how clichéd it was and how it would affect Josh’s future prospects as a protagonist that I nearly skimmed over its primary role in the story: it was a MacGuffin that came with an instant leadership position over the other Entitled Knights.

Now, to be perfectly honest, under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even consider such a thing, as I still wasn’t entirely at peace with how I was slowly getting pigeonholed into a leadership position not only by my friends, but even the Fauns and an entire clan of ninjas. However, this particular position came with one extremely important perk: it gave me an opportunity to subvert the Knights and possibly make them stop harassing my girlfriend and her family, which was the most crucial step in my plan to help her achieve her dream of becoming a professional metal singer.

In the past, I had a couple of vague plans formulated to achieve that goal already, but those all revolved around ideas for permanently removing the Knights from the picture. I’ve taken that as a premise because, considering the bad blood between them and the Draconians, I couldn’t think of a peaceful resolution. Even my most ‘diplomatic’ plan involved beating the Knights up and then using my Phantom Limbs to break all their enchanted gear so that they wouldn’t be able to bounce back, but now that I had an alternative, it was worth giving it a try. Not to mention, it would serve as a giant middle finger to the Narrative and its arcs or routes or what have you, and if Judy’s theory was correct, we might even see some direct pushback that could help us figure out what makes ‘the plot’ tick.

Long story short, I decided to give this a shot, but before that, I really needed to brush up my knowledge on the Knights, and so I dived headlong into the Celestial Hub’s database for answers, using Judy’s notes on the topic as a guideline for search terms. I did this for over an hour and I was… less than successful.

Put simply, I couldn’t find anything I didn’t already know. They had enchanted gear, they were the arch-enemies of the Draconians, and they had oaths. There were a few details about the Entitled Knights and their current operations, but I was already well aware of those things. In retrospect, it kind of made sense that there would be little info on the history and internal workings of these guys; as far as I could gather, the Knights were something of a black-ops by the Celestial Intelligence Network, though I figured they were called something else back in the day.

They were supposed to be disposable pawns in their power games and operating under plausible deniability, so most of the info on them was generic stuff you could find anywhere else, with only some of the most highly classified files hinting at their origins. Hell, probably even I wouldn’t know about this if I didn’t stumble upon a file very early on that was discussing the origins of the Knights’ weapons and how they were made by Celestial craftsmen, and I found that just by chance. Though again, maybe there were more such files on the Hub, but the indexing still left a lot to be desired, so unless I resolved myself to start randomly opening old files just to check if they had anything to do with them, I doubted I’d chance upon another such lucky break.

By the way, I looked up the aforementioned file again after being reminded of it, and while it detailed a couple of weapons, there was nothing in it about the Excalibur-expy hidden in the secret base’s storage. I did, however, find a description that matched the gear of Ms. Unicorn, so I committed those to memory. Apparently the Unicorn Knight was specialized in speed and countering various forms of magic, including combat spells and wards. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any info about what the Lion Knight was supposed to be good at, so I decided my specialization was probably refuge in audacity and breaking the rules of the universe. Jokes aside, I figured I’d have to ask the talking sword about this. Let’s just hope it was actually knowledgeable about these things.

Moving on, I continued to scan the Hub for any worthwhile morsels of information on the Knights, but to little apparent avail. I was just about to log out and use one of my sock-puppets to ask in the forums when I was unexpectedly startled by a loud ringing noise. For a long second I could only blink in confusion, but then I managed to connect the dots and I immediately let out a breath that was halfway between expectant and exasperated. Just the other day, Snowy told me that she added an extra function to her wards, where they would notify the people in the house when they repelled someone. She apparently did so after that one time Rinne tried to come over and was stuck outside for half an hour because she kept bouncing off the wards. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if it really was a bug, or my sister was playing a mean prank on her.

But back to the warning bells. Honestly speaking, I was half-expecting that something like this would happen. Since the girls left the house, I imagined there was a fifty-fifty chance that Ms. Unicorn would either harass them, or she’d try to make contact with me again. Because of this, I was startled by the sound telling me about a newcomer trying to cross the wards, but I wasn’t surprised. No, that happened when I glanced out the window. I took a second look, just to be sure, but once I was one hundred percent certain that I wasn’t seeing things, I let out another sigh, this one fully exasperated, and turned off my PC. Once I was sure it was offline, I quickly straightened my clothes, and just as I was done, I could already hear the sound of the doorbell ringing.

I made my way down the stairs, across the living room, and then took a deep breath just before I reached for the doorknob.

“Ah. Hello, Leonard!”

The moment I opened the door, I was greeted by a certain hapless Celestial. He was dressed casually, at least as much as the weather allowed, and whether by chance or design, he had a couple of tufts of his sandy blonde hair sticking out from under his brown knit beany. Honestly speaking, the guy was pretty much a textbook example of the awkward, goofy bishounen archetype. He probably used that uselessly handsome face of his to get into the good graces of Ammy too.

More importantly, behind him on the sidewalk stood a tall, wiry man dressed in a light brown trench coat and a matching fedora. I’ve no idea what he was thinking, but he looked conspicuous as hell. Our eyes met, and I could finally take a better look at his face. He had a narrow head, with a prominent hawk nose, and both his brown eyes and his cheeks were a little sunken, giving his face an overall ‘angular’ feel. He had a cigarette hanging in the corner of his mouth, and he would’ve looked just a bit menacing if not for the red, swollen spot on his forehead, no doubt the end result of walking headlong into Snowy’s wards.

I glanced back at the awkwardly fidgeting Mike, and the moment he noticed he had my attention, he hastily sputtered out, “There seems to be some kind of problem and we can’t come closer to your house. I mean, I can come closer, but he can’t and… erm… Wait, let me introduce him first. I suppose I should’ve started with that, but I was really surprised when he—”

At this point I decided to ignore the guy and promptly faced the middle-aged man cosplaying as a noir private eye again.

“Optio Arpachshad Jaacobah from CIEL, if I’m not mistaken,” I greeted the man with a small nod, which he immediately returned without even flinching.

“That’s me,” the man stated in a voice that sounded like auditory sandpaper. “And you’re Leonard Dunning, also known as the Chimera Slayer of Critias.”

“Among other things,” I answered with the absolute barest minimum of courtesy. Here’s the meta question of the day: did this guy show up at my doorstep because I just checked the Hub and learned of his arrival, or did I get hit by the nebulous ‘narrative influence’ to check the Hub in preparation of his arrival? Alternatively, was this a meta-thing, or was I getting paranoid? It annoyed me to no end that, due to our lack of fundamental understanding of what made the Simulacrum do its thing, I had literally no way to tell, so in the end I let out a long sigh and, still ignoring the increasingly more perplexed Michael, and stepped out of the way. “Please come in, and don’t mind the wards. I imagine you’re here to talk business.”

“Indeed,” the sullen man confirmed, casually threw away his half-finished smoke, and then walked in like he owned the place while also ignoring Mike in the process. At last, the hapless Celestial also came inside, and as I closed the door, I couldn’t help but wonder if it would’ve been better or worse if Ms. Unicorn showed up instead…